Fear

Recently, I talked to an engineer who wants to do a new business. We agreed that we would have to talk to some target customers to understand them better. He gave a lot of logical reasons to not do it, i.e not necessary, what needs now is to find a biz co-founder who can do it. I then realised that he was just trying to make excuse. He is afraid to do a thing that he is not familiar with.

After beating about the bush for a long time, I didn’t know how I gather enough confidence to tell him that “I think you’re just making excuses”. He was silent in some mins (not reply). Then, he suddenly told me, yes, I am just trying to make excuse because I am not confident.

I can understand that feeling. When I was at 2nd year, I took a telesales part time job. My job was to call restaurant owners to persuade them to buy our recruitment services. We were given a long list of their number with a little information. We would pick up the phone, saying hello, asking for some minutes and trying to persuade them to buy is terrifying. Most of them were nice enough to refuse after I asked for some minutes. Some was busy enough to stop me right the moment I said “I am from….”. Few of them were polite enough to listen to my speaking. Fewer were interested enough to give us email to follow up…

This job is terrifying from the very beginning. The fear was not from the failure or success of the call. It was from the job itself. Just picking up the phone and not knowing who was talking to us over there was scary already. Even 3 weeks later, I still felt scary every picking up the phone.

But the only way to overcome is just do it. Just pick up the phone and say hello. I realized that delaying by thinking how the talk would make us scarier.

I think, we all have experienced that kind of fear sometimes. The fear when we have to do something that we have no experience, something we know that is bigger than us. No words can express that fear, but I think you can understand it. The only way to overcome is just pick up the phone & say hello, and then face with other fears coming up.

Back to the founder, I think accepting that we’re scary is a good thing already. I didn’t remember what we talked later, but he then decided to prepare a script for the talk to target customers, which is good. But he still needs pick up the phone, I think.

Btw, I found this article is very good, talking about overcoming what we know we have to do but aren’t ready to do.

….because I was raised to be nice, play by the rules, not be obnoxious, and not annoy people. But, oftentimes when you’re running your own company, you have you break all those rules if you want to be successful. You have to annoy people (in a nice way and sometimes not in a nice way). You have to invite yourself to things when you’re not invited. You have to call or email people a thousand and one times to get attention — all the things my mom taught me not to do. (I suppose my mom never taught me how to use email.) Meanwhile, over the years, both my co-founder and I have noticed that a number of frat boys (not to generalize all frat boys) have shown they’re really good at doing all of those things. So, when it comes to thinking about whether to call XYZ person for the 100th time and it feels like an annoying thing to do, we always check the sign before picking up the phone.

Source, Elizabeth Yin